Sorry, but canned pumpkin isn't real pumpkin

Flickr/Meerkatbaby
When autumn rolls around, it means one thing: pumpkin everything. But before you stock up on all that pumpkin (or like, sipping and 'gramming that PSL), there's something you need to know about the canned fruit, and it's going to make your entire life feel like a lie. Get ready to feel some things.

You're probably familiar with One-Pie and Libby's Canned Pumpkin. You know the ones — those white and orange cans your mom filled the pantry with every Thanksgiving, the ones that say "100% pure pumpkin" on the label.

As it turns out, even though pumpkin purée makers write pumpkin on the can, it's actually a strain of Dickinson squash. And the closest produce relative to it isn't even pumpkin. It's butternut squash.

Seriously, what is happening right now and how are they getting away with this trickery?!

Apparently, the Food and Drug Administration has difficulty drawing a line between pumpkins and "golden-fleshed" winter squash, making it legal for brands to label their product as completely pumpkin, when they might actually serving up something different.
Though technically pumpkin is a type of squash.

Here's the FDA's definition of canned pumpkin: "Canned pumpkin and canned squash is the canned product prepared from clean, sound, properly matured, golden fleshed, firm shelled, sweet varieties of either pumpkins or squashes by washing, stemming, cutting, steaming and reducing to a pulp."

And apparently this has been the case since 1957, with not much changing other than slight tweaks to the grading system for canned veggies introduced this year, Buzzfeed reports.

So if you're hell-bent on keeping things totally authentic this fall, your best bet is to make your own purée— you know, like from an actual pumpkin. But if that feels like too much work, go ahead and keep enjoying that canned squash. Because your taste buds honestly can't tell the difference.